Running out of Storage ... What do I do??

[NMCynthia]

Hi all!

A couple of days ago my phone alerted me that I was running out of storage. A couple of MONTHS ago my storage was only at 37%, so, of course, I freaked! My Storage showed that it was over 94% full, so I dumped every App that I don't really use. Now I'm "only" at 93% full. In system>storage I show only small amounts of memory taken up by photos, music, games, etc., and the largest amount, "other apps", is at 36GB. Under Apps Storage, the largest amount of memory is taken up by SMS Backup & Restore, at 24.33GB, but when I click on it, it says that the app is taking up 25.59MB of space, User data is 24.31GB, cache is 2.61MB.

Then you have your Clear storage and Clear cache buttons. I, obviously, have no idea what this will do, but I have seen many of you suggesting others do this for various reasons. Is this something that I should do to solve my sudden lack of storage problem? What will happen?

Thanks!!

 

[Rukbat]

The app is taking 25.59MB, but the backups are taking up 24.33GB. You probably have other apps in the same state. Delete all but your most recent backup iif you don't need to keep copies of deleted texts. That will gain you about 24GB of space. Do the same thing with any other app that's using a lot of storage.

(Memory is RAM, backups are kept in storage, which is not RAM. Totally different things. But someone called solid state storage in phones "memory" and it stuck. You don't call an SSD "memory", but it;s the same as the storage in your phone.)

 

[NMCynthia]

Thank you so much! I just went ahead and deleted the app, rather than delete old items, and now I'm down to 55% of my storage used.

In poking around I found that all the memory in Google Drive was taken up with what I think is backups of calls, for some reason. When I click on a file, then click on the 3-dot menu on the right, I'm offered all sorts of actions EXCEPT DELETE. How can I delete these files?